Prenocephale

Chapter • Meet the dinosaur

Overview

Prenocephale prenes was a small, bipedal plant-eating dinosaur with one of the most distinctive heads of any dinosaur. The roof of its skull was swollen into a smooth, almost spherical dome of solid bone that rose high above the eyes. Unlike its close relative Homalocephale, it had no flat shelf at the back of the head; instead the dome was ringed by a row of small bony nodes and spikes that ran along the rear margin of the skull and forward along the snout. The animal reached roughly two to two and a half metres in length and probably weighed between 20 and 45 kilograms — about the size of a large sheep. Its body was compact, with short arms, powerful hind legs, a broad pelvis and a stiffened tail that held the body horizontally over the hips. Prenocephale walked leaning forward with its tail off the ground, never upright like a kangaroo and never dragging its tail.

Chapter • Where it lived

Habitat

Prenocephale prenes is known from the Nemegt Formation of the Gobi Desert in southern Mongolia, deposits laid down in the latest Cretaceous (Maastrichtian, roughly 71–68 million years ago). Unlike the older, dune-dominated sandstones of the Djadochta and Barun Goyot formations, the Nemegt beds formed in a distinctly wetter setting of meandering rivers, floodplains, lakes and patches of forest, where turtles, crocodyliforms and large hadrosaurs gathered along the waterways. The holotype, a nearly complete skull catalogued as ZPAL MgD-I/104, was collected during the Polish–Mongolian expeditions of the 1960s and 1970s and described in 1974.

Chapter • Wild behavior

Behavior & Ecology

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Chapter • Scientific place

Taxonomy